As we enter a New Year in our Fair City, I thought it might be helpful to take a moment to reflect on the last 12 months and everything the Perth City Leadership Forum has been up to.

Ultimately it is about how our area succeeds – how the people of Perthshire and Kinross are getting on, how our businesses and communities are coping, how our environment is flourishing or not, and what we can all do to help create a more positive future for the Perthshire and environs.   It is clear the Council cannot do this alone so it is vital that we engage and help co-ordinate those individuals and businesses who can help.   Ideally we want everyone in the area to become ambassadors for Perthshire, to have a sense of place and pride in the area, and to help us build its social, environmental and economic resilience.  The more we can work together across sectors and communities, channel efforts towards the shared goal of creating the most sustainable small city, and build on the endemic natural strengths of the whole of Perthshire and Kinross, the more we will achieve.

This has undoubtedly been an eventful year, and one that has been difficult for many. With life beginning to return to normal at the beginning of the year following the pandemic, many have still been trying to get back on track.  Coupled with other world events, political upheavals, heightened concern around illnesses, a more dispersed workforce and now the cost of living crisis it has all meant that any return is slow and sporadic. There is clearly still a long way to go.

Perth City Leadership Forum has been busy despite these setbacks, and as volunteers, despite the pressures of their own business concerns and work pressures.  Much of this has been focused behind the scenes in laying the ground work for future projects and securing support from all sorts of businesses, individuals and public bodies, interested in helping develop Perth as the most sustainable small city in Europe.  Whilst this clearly remains a long-term aspiration, the vision alone has generated good will, support and already begun to help influence funding to the area, and we hope we can build on this throughout 2023.

There have been investments by many of the larger employers such as SSE in new staff, Aviva in sustainability measures, and Stagecoach bringing 60 new jobs to the area with their UK customer contact centre, and the plans to make Perth one of the first cities in Scotland with a fully electric fleet.  We have visited key projects and encouraged ambition and investment at every turn – from education schemes to new housing, and from travel plans to connectivity.  We have backed developments where we believe they help drive the sustainability agenda.  We have presented regularly to community groups and the Ambassadors and others.   We have convened key business figures around the sustainable small city vision and around a response to the cost of living crisis, and this will continue into next year.  We have a major project we are developing to test a private energy grid for the area, making electric and heat supplies local and renewable, which if we can pull it off, will not only make the city and other towns in the area, significantly carbon neutral, but will also allow local control of energy pricing and make the area more energy independent.  We believe it could also lead to increased training opportunities, and new jobs and skills development longer term too.

We have worked closely with PKC and a large number of other organisations, to raise the ambition for Perth and Perthshire and have given presentations locally and nationally about the various key aims.  We have also received a lot of requests and hosted a dozen presentations, a reminder of the huge and largely untapped skills base that there is locally.  There is a vast amount of expertise, creativity, initiative and determination in the people living in this area, and it reinforces our belief that the more people who can help, and get behind a shared agenda, the more we can see our area thrive and develop.

I know 2022 has been difficult for most of us, and nobody has had much spare capacity, and people are still only now getting back to face to face meetings, so it has been harder than it might have been to make as much progress as we would have liked.  However, despite its many challenges, there has been progress, which we hope will allow more rapid delivery during the next 12 months.   I am very grateful for the continued support of our members and volunteers, the Board, the Council staff and politicians, and our wider partners and collaborators.

This coming year, 2023, relies on delivering some of these ideas, for which the groundwork has been laid.  But it is also a year to build more of a sense of place and belief in Perth, because we believe that by working together we can achieve an awful lot more for the area.  With deepening austerity and the cost of living crisis, and the high levels of poverty already affecting families in the area, we are only going to see the region thrive if we pull together more than ever, and work towards a set of shared solutions, and that remains the primary goal of the PCLF going forwards.

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has engaged with us for your continued support, especially with such a challenging economic back drop, and we are hopeful that we can work together in the months and years to come to deliver some really meaningful change.

If you would like to become an ambassador please get in touch via the website at www.perthambassadors.co.uk

Mike Robinson, Chair, PCLF